Spring is finally here in the northeastern U.S.! Magnificent magnolia trees and sunny daffodils have been bringing a smile to my face as I go on my lunchtime walks. But beautiful things can have a dark side, and if the film Midsommar has taught us anything, it’s that you can still experience intense terror while surrounded by colorful flowers. Flowers pop up in all sorts of unexpected places in Gothic literature. Here are just a few examples below:
It’s time for another installment of Gothic Settings, a series of posts in which I explore recurring landscapes and structures that serve as the backdrop to innumerable Gothic stories. So far, we’ve explored such iconic settings as the classic castle and the romantic moors. This week’s setting is one of my very favorites: the ancestral home.
“Back to School” doesn’t look quite the same this year. Whether you’re attending virtually, in person, hybrid, or still waiting on your school administrators to figure that out, things are sure to be rather chaotic as we try to navigate this new reality of educating during a pandemic. I figured I would try to reintroduce a little normalcy to this fall season by bringing back my old tradition of putting together a mini-syllabus of classic Gothic works for the start of the school year. In my initial Back to School Reading List, I highlighted a few Gothic novels you’re most likely to come across in class. I followed that post up with a Short Story Edition, Drama Edition, and Poetry Edition of the reading list. Today, I’m returning to novels to spotlight a few more classics that didn’t make it into the initial post: Continue reading Back to School Reading List, Part 2
I often say that the core concept at the heart of the Gothic is the idea of the past haunting the present. One common way that this manifests in stories is through an old prophecy or curse. Prophecies serve to explain how the story’s current action is rooted in some event of the past. In many cases, the prophecy addresses a past wrong and how it might be revenged or righted. Generally, some injustice was committed by a member of a previous generation, and now the perpetrator’s descendants suffer the consequences, recalling the biblical notion that “the sins of the father shall be visited upon the children.” The prophecy can come from a divine source, or can be intentionally inflicted as a curse by a character associated with witchcraft. Prophecies may or may not be paired with other supernatural elements, such as literal hauntings by ghosts, revenants, or doppelgangers. Continue reading Gothic Tropes: Prophecies and Curses
Death is a strange chapter in everyone’s story. Yet as we read through action-packed novels like the Game of Thrones series where a character dies almost every chapter, literary deaths may start to seem commonplace and we give little thought to how they are presented. For gothic authors, however, a character’s death is an opportunity to explore that fascinating, unknowable state and our relationship with it. What does it mean to be dead? How will this death impact the story? And how should we feel about it? Sometimes the only way to answer these questions is by employing some truly unique literary techniques. Below are three of my favorite unusual depictions of death in literature: Continue reading Literature’s Strangest Chapters on Death
